Thursday, April 27, 2017

The much ballyhooed History Channel Six Part “documentary” - JFK
Declassified is a slick but unconvincing piece of propaganda, a classic case of
disinformation that mixes some truth with total falsehoods to promote the
original Phase One cover-story for the Dealey Plaza Operation – that the Cuban
Castro Communists were behind it.

The guys who put
together this program, - 21 year CIA veteran Bob Baer and former LAPD lieutenant
Adam Bercovici, and a US military intelligence officer who has served in Iraq
and Afghanistan – can and should be able to determine the truth. But Baer isn’t
interested in determining the truth, and Bercoici is no Columbo, as he worked for the same police department that refuses to investigate and identify the true
assassin(s) of RFK.

It is a very distinct
psychological warfare operation – promoted mainly by those with close ties to
the CIA, and most of whom, as Dan Hardway points out, can be traced directly to
one David Atlee Phillips, a CIA propaganda specialist, and Oswald associate.

While they promote the idea they are presenting new information and the files are declassified, I
haven’t seen anything new after the first installment, and can tell you that
none of what they have fielded so far is from recently declassified documents.

Some of what they say
is true however, and can take the real investigation into the total truth onto
another level, - such as the fact that Oswald used intelligence tradecraft and acted like he was on a mission, but
first let’s dismiss the total falsehoods that are continuously repeated –
beginning with the idea that one sniper alone – Lee Harvey Oswald, executed the
President by himself.

The truth is that the
facts at the scene indicate that Oswald was not on the Sixth Floor of the Texas
School Book Depository (TSBD) at the time of the shooting, and that the third
class sniper in the window with the white shirt and bald spot was not Oswald,
who was what he said he was, set up as a patsy and fall guy in a much larger
plot. Oswald’s role – Ozzie Rabbit, was to get the investigators to chase him
and pin the tail of the donkey on Castro Communists.

Now whether Oswald was
the lone gunman or a patsy, regardless of his role, his basic background and
personality profile indicates he has a Covert Operative Personality profile
(COP), and as JFK Declassified states – Oswald used intelligence trade craft,
therefore, whatever happened at Dealey Plaza was a covert intelligence operation
and should be viewed and investigated as such.

It is the military
intelligence officer in the program who states positively, and I agree with him, that Oswald
followed and utilized intelligence tradecraft – that are used by every
intelligence agency, as Allen Dulles clearly states in his book “The Craft of
Intelligence,” and not just the KGB and CIA.

Just as John Barron
does when he discusses “disinformation,” they only apply it to the Soviets,
when in fact the CIA and US military are more proficient in the use of
disinformation and black propaganda. As Dan Hardway notes in his review of
Antonio Veciana's book – former US Army and CIA officer Paul Linebarger wrote
the book on propaganda and disinformation and taught covert operational
procedures and intelligence trade craft to David A. Phillips, E. Howard Hunt and
Edward Lansdale. Someone, one of Linebarger’s students, taught Veciana and
Oswald.

But according to Baer,
Oswald’s use of intelligence trade craft – “the kind of trade craft the KGB is
known for,” is proof of his meeting with the Soviet intelligence officers in
Mexico City - false logic.

Oswald’s use
of such trade craft is only proof that he was taught the trade craft, and was, as the
program suggests, supported by an intelligence network, but not necessarily a
Soviet or Cuban Communist network – more likely an anti-Communist domestic
intelligence agency, such as the CIA or Office of Naval Intelligence.

Baer does go to Mexico
City and visits the Hotel Commercio where Oswald stayed, and his military
intelligence associate says this is an “out of the way place a tourist wouldn’t
go, a place that’s off the radar, and consistent with someone on a mission.”

“I’ve run dozens of
similar operations,” Baer says proudly,

Oswald was on a
mission all right – but not the mission that Baer is looking for.

In Mexico City they
find a CIA “LP” – Listening Post – across the street from the Soviet Embassy,
but don’t bother to explain why there is no record of Oswald there – no photos
no tape recording, when in fact they routinely took photos of everyone entering
and leaving the premises, and had bugged the embassy, which makes Baer conclude
that Oswald must have met his secret Soviet contacts elsewhere, where they
could not be observed by the CIA.

But the bottom line is
Oswald did visit the Soviet embassy, did talk to the Soviet officials and the
lack of evidence that he met them elsewhere is not proof that he did.

Baer says he wants to
“pressure test” his thesis, by proving that Oswald could have met a Soviet
officer at the Bull ring by meeting someone there without his LAPD and military
intelligence associate observing him, and he does. That to him shows “Oswald could have met with America’s enemies the KGB undetected by the CIA,”
and this brings him “one step closer to proving the Russians KGB were involved
in the assassination.”

Baer and company aren't interested in learning or detecting the truth, they are interested in proving a conspiracy theory, an already discredited theory, but one that they persist is possible if not plausible.

The idea that Oswald
had a postcard of a bull ring, and could have met a Soviet intelligence officer
there is ludicrous. It has already been established that Oswald met privately
with an American bull fighter at the Hotel Luna in Mexico City, and also met with
Cuban officials from their embassy at a private “Twist Party,” as Phil Shenon
has written a book about. Oswald's possible association with the American bull fighter at the Hotel Luna is also the subject of two books, but former CIA officer Baer fails to even
mention them. Maybe he will as I have only seen the first segment of this six part
fake “documentary.”

These guys are not
even trying to be deceptive – they come right out and tell you that their goal
is to establish the false fact that Oswald – the accused assassin – they call him the
lone assassin, met secretly with Soviet intelligence officers and had the
support of an intelligence network in the course of carrying out the Dealy
Plaza operation.

So now, we have
established two facts – Oswald used intelligence trade craft and that whatever
happened at Dealey Plaza – regardless of Oswald’s role as sniper or patsy, the
assassination was a covert intelligence operation designed to shield and
protect the actual sponsors.

While Baer and company
attempt to blame the assassination on a Communist intelligence network, it is
quite clear that they themselves are distorting the truth and falling back on
the original Phase One cover story designed as part of the plan to kill JFK at
Dealey Plaza.

The Phase One cover
story – as Peter Dale Scott has shown, was intended to acknowledge the fact the
ambush was a conspiracy, that Oswald was involved and that Castro Cuban Commies
were behind the plot. It was a patently transparent cover story that was quickly
rejected by LBJ on the night of the assassination – while he was holed up in
his Executive Office Building (EOB) vice president’s office. Instead, they adopted the Phase
Two – cover story that JFK was assassinated by a deranged lone nut case – Lee
Harvey Oswald – the former US Marine defector to the Soviet Union and visitor
to the Cuban and Soviet embassies in Mexico City a few weeks before the murder.

Baer says that Oswald
knew that he was going to assassinate JFK when he was in Mexico City – but I’m not so
sure he knew anything of the sort. So far it has not even been mentioned that
Oswald visited the Cuban embassy first before going to the Soviet embassy, so
there’s five more installments to go, but we can sense where this is going.

Baer calls Oswald a
“Walk in,” as someone who comes in out of the blue and offers information, he
mentions “sleeper cells,” and the fact that Oswald had “accomplices.” But he
doesn’t bother mentioning the real accomplices we know associated with Oswald – George deMohrenschildt, Ruth
and Michael Paine – who transported and kept the alleged rifle used in the
assassination, Volkmar Schmidt, who encouraged Oswald to shoot at Walker, Guy
Bannister and David Ferrie in New Orleans or any of the White Russians Oswald
associated with in Dallas, like Jean deMenil, George Bouhe, et al.

Baer mentions that
over 2 million assassination related records have been released so far, but
falsely states that “no one has analyzed them – no one has taken the time to
look at them,” when in fact they have been read and analyzed by dozens of
serious researchers – John Newman, Bill Simpich, Malcolm Blunt, Jerry Shinley,
Rex Bradford, Larry Hancock, and none of these people have
been consulted or mentioned in this fake “documentary” so far.

How come CIA guys like this get hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce shows that advance fake conspiracy theories, when there's a dozen real, hard working, independent researchers that are digging deep into the records and learning the total truth, can't get a dime in finding or any interest whatsoever in making a documentary that explains what really happened at Dealey Plaza?

Baer says that while
he was a CIA officer for over two decades, he obtained the permission of then
CIA director George H. W. Bush [ Bush as Director of Central Intelligence — Central Intelligence Agency] to review certain CIA assassination files, but
when he tried to obtain them he was told they were “lost,” and no longer exist,
probably a true fact.

“Nothing the CIA does
is random,” Baer says correctly. “It’s either a colossal incompetence or an
original cover-up.”

“All though the
declassified files there is smoke,” Baer says, “I want to find the fire.”

“Oswald had network
support,” Baer also says correctly, “and the declassified files will prove it,”
but that network isn’t the one he is looking for – it is not a Soviet or Cuban
network but a domestic anti-communist network, probably a US military
intelligence network, one that Baer does not look for and will certainly not
find.

JFK Declassified and
the Baer project is very clearly a Phase One cover story – the Castro Cuban
Commie fallback position now that the Phase Two – JFK killed by a lone nut has
been clearly shown to be false and rejected by the vast majority of people.

In his March Sunshine Week presentation at the
National Press Club, Federal Judge John Tunheim called attention to the Secret
Service Threat Sheets for 1963 that the Review Board requested but the Secret
Service wanted to keep secret.

The former chairman of the Assassinations Records
Review Board said: “Actually, the Secret Service was probably the most
difficult agency. They were the only one that tried to reclassify material
after we took office to keep the information away from us. And it wasn’t
information that was all that important.”

“They fought us on the Threat Sheets,” Tunheim said,
“and they would be important since the President was assassinated that fall, so
the Threat Sheets would be relevant, but they fought us on that. And I’m not
sure as to what actually happened there, because it was after we left office.”

It was quite common for the various agencies seeking
to keep records secret to continue to withhold them until after the Review
Board was out of business, even though they were required to sign off on a
sworn statement agreeing to continue to turn over assassination records to the
National Archives after the Review Board had ceased to exist.

Indeed, the Threat Sheets for 1963 would be important,
and they most certainly are relevant to the assassination, should be in the JFK
Collection at the National Archives II and if still secret they should be
released in October.

As the late professor Philip H. Melanson, Ph.D. says
in his book “The Secret Service – The Hidden History of an Enigmatic Agency”
(Carroll & Graf, 2002), “In Washington D.C., the Secret Service ‘Watch
Office,’ complete with a switchboard that operates twenty-four hours a day,
seven days a week, screens incoming data – State Department cables,
intelligence reports from the CIA, FBI, Defense Department and National
Security Agency, and countless other private and public sources – alerting the
Secret Service and Treasury officials via the switchboard when there is an
unusual event or emergency.”

“The Secret Service’s Protective Research data bank is
crammed with files on groups, organizations, people and past events and
incidents, all of them indexed and cross-indexed. What most Americans do not
know is that a simple call or E-mail from someone with a personal ax to grind
can land virtually anyone on the Watch List. Many thousands of citizens – most of
them harmless – are on file as having been checked out for one reason or
another as potential threats, and each year the file swells with several
thousand new names. Among these, there can be as many as a thousand individuals
arrested and several hundred convicted for threats against public officials…”

“The system is, as the Service describes it, is ‘primarily
directed toward identifying dangerous individuals.’ There are over fifty
thousand Americans in the Protective Research files, ostensibly because of some
actual or potential threat or some problem or characteristic that makes them
potentially dangerous. Cross-checked against lists of employees at the hotels
or airports where protectees appear, the group is constantly monitored.”

“When the president is on the road, the file is
whittled down to identify dangerous people in the specific area that he will
visit. Dubbed the “Trip File,” it may contain as many as one hundred names;
with state and local law-enforcement officers and federal field officers, the
Service attempts to check out and account for every person in the trip file. In
their advance work, agents try to learn whether these individuals are still in
the area; whether they are in jail, hospitalized, or at liberty; and what their
current condition is, which usually means seeking to interview them. Sometimes,
if a red flag of some sort goes up in the interview, a few people will actually
be detained for the duration of the president’s visit.”

“A second and more menacing list of names is prepared
for each trip. These are individuals in the area who are considered to be definitely
dangerous, as opposed to potentially dangerous, or who remain unaccounted for
after the efforts to check out each person in the Trip File. Known as ‘the
Album,’ the second file includes a photo and profile of each individual and is
studied by every agent in the protective squad. Particularly dangerous cases
are red-flagged with a ‘Look-Out.’ As are previously accounted for individuals
in the Trip File who suddenly become unaccounted for because of escape from
prison or a mental institution.”

While this system is now upgraded to the digital
computer age, it functioned pretty much the same back in 1963 except they used
index cards, case files and a big blackboard on which the top threats were
listed.

As recalled by former agent Gerald Blaine in his book “The
White House Detail” (Gallery Books, 2010, p. 59), “The first stop before
any advance was always the PRS (Protective Research Service) offices were the
nerve center for tracking threat cases. Any time there was a threat made against
the president’s life – whether it was a written letter, a phone call, details
gathered from an informant, field investigation, or an unstable person trying
to get inside the Northwest Gate of the White House – an investigative report
was initiated and a case file number issued. A PRS agent would type the report
on carbon paper so there would be multiple copies, noting the threat maker’s
name, last known address, a synopsis of the threats made, a description of the
person, and their medical history, if known.”

“Cases were analyzed and categorized according to the seriousness
of the threat. They ranged from ‘extremely dangerous’ to the innocuous ‘gate
crasher,’….whenever somebody made a threat against the president, they would be
categorized as a permanent risk. There’d be an investigation, the individual
would be monitored, and the case file would remain in the Protective Research
file for as long as the person was still alive.”

“The records room of the PDS office contained rows and
rows of gray metal four-drawer file cabinets that held thousands of threat
suspect files, organized by case number. There were smaller file cabinets where
index cards of each suspect were organized both geographically and
alphabetically. The cards were cross-referenced to the case files. Thus if you
knew either the name of a suspect or their last known location, you could go to
the small index drawers, locate the card, which would have the case number on
it, then go to the large filing cabinets to get the master file.”

“The most serious threat suspects were the ones on the
flash cards every agent carried with them at all times. It was the nature of
threat makers to wander as vagabonds or itinerants, moving from town to town or
state to state. You never knew when or where one of them might show up.”

“Blaine walked over to the bulletin board where the
PRS kept a list of current threat makes or gate crashers from around the
country who were of immediate concern. Most of the cases were familiar names
from the flash cards he already had.”

While Special Agent Roy Kellerman would go to Dallas
as the advance man there, Blaine was the advance man for the president’s trip
to Tampa a week earlier, and was preparing for the president’s visits to both
Tampa and Texas.

“Blaine turned to (Agent Cecil) Taylor, who was
mimeographing and preparing more flash cards. ‘Are there any active files for
Texas?’ Blaine asked.”

“’No, Roy Kellerman just gave me a heads-up about the
president’s upcoming trip, so I did a thorough check. There weren’t any active
threats in Texas. This is all we have on the current nationwide active list.’
Taylor pointed to the bulletin board as Blaine reviewed the names on the list.”

1.Stanley
Berman – professional gate crasher.

2.Carl
Brookman – on record with FBI subversive activities in the Nazi Party and
possible association with the Communist Party. Possesses firearm.

8.Peppi Duran Flores – threatened Vice President Lyndon
Johnson. Says he is a communist and pro-Castro.

9.Wayne
L. Gainey – claimed the KKK authorized him to kill the president in 1963.
Teenager.

John
William Warrington – mental; wrote five letters threatening JFK for his
association with Martin Luther King, Jr.; says he will be lying in ambush in
Florida.

“’Here you go,’ Cecil (Taylor) said as he handed
Blaine the copies. ‘We’ll let you know if anything pops up. Obviously Arnie
Peppers has a good handle on things down there.’”

“Blaine was relieved to know that Arnie Peppers was
still in the Tampa area. His biggest concern was the anti- and pro-Castro
groups, but he knew that Peppers and another Florida field agent, Ernie Aragon,
had established a source network in Miami and Tampa that was so well tuned,
they heard about any new faces in the Cuban community the minute they stepped
foot into Florida. Arnie would be a huge help on this advance.”

The Threat Sheets are important and relevant not only
because they were kept from the Review Board but they were kept from the Secret
Service Advance man assigned to Dallas, Special Agent Roy Kellerman.

As reported in Gerald Blaine’s “The White House
Detail,” as soon as he got the Dallas assignment Kellerman went directly to
the Protective Research Service (PRS) to get the latest threat reports from
that area of the country, and he was told by agent Cecil Taylor that there wasn’t
any. While Blaine says Kellerman was pleased there were no active threat
reports from Texas, he was actually quite astonished, as he knew Texas, Dallas
in particular, was a hot bed of radical extremists.

Even if you just read the newspapers you knew that
Lyndon Johnson and his wife were accosted and threatened in Dallas by rabid
right wingers while on the 1960 campaign trail, a group of wealthy women led by
Congressman Bruce Alger they called “The Mink Coat Mob.”

Then there was a sniper on the lose who took a shot at
General Walker, and the well known fact that UN Ambassador Adlai-Stevenson was
physically assaulted in Dallas a few weeks earlier by right wing protesters who
were still being investigated at the time of the assassination.

“From the initial planning of the (Texas) trip,”
writes Phil Melanson, “many politicians and aides were concerned about the
President’s safety in Texas. The week before Kennedy’s visit, United Nations
Ambassador Adlai Stevenson had come to Dallas to speak to the local United
Nations Association. He was confronted by demonstrators who cursed him, spat
upon him, and shoved to get at him. One picketer slammed his sign against the ambassador’s
head. The shaken Stevenson called Kennedy advisor Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and
urged that the president not go to Dallas.”

“In the weeks before Kennedy arrived in Dallas, the
Service did make a special effort to identify the individuals who had fomented
a near-riot by throwing rocks during the Adlai Stevenson incident. Agents
worked with the Dallas police, who found an informant willing to identify the
ringleaders of the demonstration by viewing a television film of the incident;
then the Secret Service made still pictures of these ringleaders and
distributed the images to agents and police who would be stationed at Love
Field and at the Trade Mart. None of these potential troublemakers was ever
spotted before or during the Kennedy visit.”

“Additionally, the Stevension episode prompted the
Service to pay ‘special attention to extremist groups known to be active in the
Dallas area.”

That the PRB could not identify any potential threats
to the president in the entire state of Texas was just unbelievable, and
Kellerman must have known something was up.

Kellermen’s boss should have been the advance man on
the Texas trip but he decided to take a vacation so Kellerman was brought in as
a replacement, and when he got to Dallas he found no shortage of potential
suspects.

As Melanson described, the local Secret Service and
Dallas police were closing in on the group that had attacked Stevenson a few
weeks earlier.

Dallas TV reporter Wes Wise said that the local police and Secret Service
closely reviewed all news camera film and photos of the protesters, singled out
certain suspects and made profile pictures of each, some of whom were
identified as Denton, Texas college students. A Denton undercover policeman was
sent in to infiltrate the group and photos of the suspects were distributed to
the Secret Service and security agents at the Trade Mart, where the president
was scheduled to speak at the moment he was killed.

One of the Stevenson protesters may have been an early
suspect in the assassination, as shortly after the murder occurred a Secret
Service agent at the Trade Mart made an emergency phone call to John Rice, the
Special Agent in Charge (SAIC) of the New Orleans Secret Service office.

At the time Rice was in the Air Force Office of Special Investigations at an
air base near Shreveport, Louisiana, where he was instructed to do a discrete
background check on a suspect in the assassination, one John Martin.

No, not Jack “Scruggs” Martin, the crazy New Orleans
investigator who dropped a dime on David Ferrie and Guy Banister. This John
Martin was a young college student, a right wing political fanatic and religious
zealot, whose family and friends described him to Rice as a young nut case.

By the end of the day however, Rice realized he had
been sent on a wild goose chase, as the alleged assassin was caught and in
custody, and Lee Harvey Oswald did have ties to New Orleans that Rice would end
up investigating, including the whereabouts of Oswald’s library card and all of
the Banister, Ferrie, Shaw shenanigans.

Rice would also begin an investigation of Colonel Jose
Rivera, a doctor in the US Army Reserves who taught science classes at a New
Orleans university for many years and expressed foreknowledge of the
assassination. Rivera would tell his research associate, another New Orleans
resident, who had talked with Oswald, that he - Rivera was aware of a “special
research project the Army was conducting using photos and films to identify
protesters and rioters,” – the same techniques the Dallas police and Secret
Service were using to identify the Stevenson protesters.

The Threat Sheets should give us some more information
on John Martin as well as the suspects in threats made against the president in
Chicago and Tampa in the weeks leading up to the assassination that Blaine was
made aware of. When former Secret Service Agent Abraham Bolden, who
investigated the Chicago threats, called attention to the fact that the Secret
Service had intentionally destroyed the Tampa Advance Reports, Blaine noted in
his book that he wrote the Tampa Advance Reports and still had copy in a box
under his bed. With that the NARA contacted Blaine and obtained the reports,
copies of which were intentionally destroyed by the Secret Service to keep them
from the ARRB and the JFK Collection.

The Threat Sheets and PRS records on threats to the
president should include the John Martin and the Stevenson attackers, the
suspects in both the Chicago and Tampa threats against the president, as well
as other known threats – Joseph Milteer, and the Alpha 66 Cuban who is recorded
on tapes as threatening the president in Dallas before he arrived there.

We know Oswald is not among them, as the FBI took him
off the watch list a few months earlier, and Oswald’s alleged visit to Mexico
City did not set off the inter-agency alarms that it should have.

Back in Dallas, Oswald’s case officer – James Hosty,
was also assigned to the Walker shooting case, but he didn’t connect Oswald to it.
After he interviewed Oswald and visited Marina, Oswald delivered a threatening
note to Hosty at the FBI office in Dallas, a note that he later destroyed.

Warren Commission attorney Sam Stern said in an
interview with the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA)

that had he knew about Oswald’s allegedly threatening note to Hosty, he “would
have regarded it as greater identification of the possibility of potential
danger in Oswald of violence,…(and) if we had found out that happened, we would
have gone to a full Commission meeting immediately, and would have made the big
decision regarding any future relationship between the Commission and the FBI.
It just would have gone to the heart of the whole relationship and the Bureau’s
motivation. The destruction of that note would have resulted in the ultimate
brouhaha.”

Besides refusing to turn over the Threat Sheets to the
Review Board and attempting to reclassify previously released records, the
Secret Service acknowledged it intentionally destroyed assassination records
after the JFK Act was passed by Congress – specifically the Tampa Advance
reports.

The Review Board also took testimony from Secret
Service agent James Mastrovito, who was charged with maintaining the records
who acknowledged destroying some of them by “culling the files.” He also said
he flushed parts of JFK’s brain down a food processor that was contained in a
sealed vial labeled JFK’s brain and the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology.

According to the HSCA report: “When
Mastrovito took charge of the JFK Assassination file, it consisted of 5 or 6
file cabinets of material. After Mastrovito finished “culling” irrelevant
material, the collection was down to one five-draw file cabinet. Mastrovito
guessed that his purging of extraneous material took place around 1970. He said
that the extraneous material consisted of records of 2000-3000 “mental cases”
who called the Secret Service after the Kennedy assassination to claim
responsibility for the shooting. Mastrovito offered that Robert Blakey
questioned him about this destruction of documents and threatened legal action.
Mastrovito pointed out that Chief Rowley’s August 1965 memo directed him to
remove irrelevant material. Blakey had obtained index cards from the Secret Service
for what were then called “White House cases” and/or CO2 cases. These cares had
been sent to the Warren Commission in a card index file. From these cares,
Warren Commission members had requested specific Secret Service reports. Blakey
had also sought specific files based on his examination of these index cards.
Apparently, Mastrovito had destroyed some files that Blakey had wanted to see.
Mastrovito decided which files to keep and which files to destroy. Mastrovito
said no one had access to the assassination file except people in the Secret
Service. Some reports were copied for the FBI and the Warren Commission.
Mastrovito said protective surveys were not in the assassination file but were
kept in the operations division.”

On my request to the National
Archives as to the current status of the Secret Service “Threat Sheets”
referred to by Judge Tunheim, I received the following reply from Martha
Murphy:

Mr. Kelly,

We were able to verify that we have
summaries of USSS records, commonly referred to as "threat sheets",
in our protected collection. These 400+ pages have been referred to USSS for
review. These pages will be released no later than the October deadline unless the
USSS files an appeal and the President upholds that appeal.

These "threat sheets" were
written by HSCA staffer Eileen Din(n)een and are notes derived from USSS
protective intelligence files.

The ARRB discussed this issue in
their Report on page 115 (sic 113) of Chapter six linked here:

Final Report ARRB – Chaper 6 Part I.
The Quest for Additional Information and Records

Final Report – Page 113

I.Miscellaneous

3. Secret Service

a. Protective survey reports.

Whenever the President traveled
outside of Washington D.C., the Secret Service would generate a Protective
Survey Report, or a ‘trip report.’ Trip reports, composed by Secret Service
agents who conducted advance work for the President’s trips, contained information
ranging from logistical details about seating arrangements to details about
individuals in the area known to have made threats against the President’s
life. Some of the survey reports document information Secret Service received
from other agencies such as the FBI or CIA.

The survey reports detail President
Kennedy’s travel, whereabouts, associations, and activities for his entire
administration. They also provide a complete picture of the Secret Service’s
protection of President Kenendy.

b. Shift reports.

The White House Detail consisted of
Secret Service agents whose duties were to personally protect the life of the
President, the Vice President, and their respective families. The White House
Detail kept ‘shift reports,’ usually authored by the Special Agent in charge of
the shift, that detailed the activity of each section during their assigned
working hours.

c. Eileen Dinneen memoranda.

Eileen Dinneen, a staff researchers
for the HSCA, obtained access to protective intelligence files and Protective Survey
Reports. Dinneen documented her review of these files in memoranda and reports.
The Review Board staff found useful Dinneen’s documentation of information
contained in the Secret Service protective intelligence files of individuals
whom the Secret Service considered to be dangerous to the lives of the
President, the Vice President, and their families from March to December 1963.
For each protective intelligence files she reviewed, Dinneen created a one-page
report documenting the name of the individual and background information the
Secret Service maintained on the individual. The Board’s vote to release in
full these “threat sheets” was the subject of the Secret Service’s May 1998
appeal to the President.

HIGHTSTOWN NJ. Unresolved hate
crimes like the racially motivated murder of black Chicago teen Emmett Till,
who was abducted, beat down and shot to death during a family visit to
Mississippi in 1955, have inspired a group of Hightstown High School students
to lobby Congress into action.

When Midwest Congressman Bobby Rush
(D-Illinois) introduced the Civil Rights Cold Case Record Collections Act of
2017 into the U.S. House of Representatives on March 1, the bill was actually
ghostwritten by roughly three dozen Hightstown students.

The junior and senior students then
persuaded Democratic U.S. Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman, who represents
Hightstown, to get on board as a co-sponsor, and they also visited Republican
offices in the nation’s capital in hopes of building bipartisan support for a
measure they hope to see signed into law.

“You can’t argue that racial
tensions exist in our country,” said Hightstown High School senior Oslene
Johnson, who helped draft the bill, also known as H.R. 1272, which seeks to
make it easier for private investigators to solve civil rights cold cases.

“And there are still families of civil rights
victims that know nothing about what happened to their relatives; you don’t
know where the bodies are buried,” Johnson said, “and I feel like the anger and
the suffering of the past will always bleed into the future if they have never
been dealt with. So personally for me, that is a huge motivation to get this
bill passed and do something for these families and to acknowledge what
happened.”

The U.S. Department of Justice,
fueled by the bipartisan Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Acts of 2007
and 2016, has a mandate to “support the full accounting of all victims whose
deaths or disappearances were the result of racially motivated crimes”
committed before 1980 and to “hold accountable under federal and state law all
individuals who were perpetrators of, or accomplices in, unsolved civil rights
murders and such disappearances.”

But the Justice Department in its
sixth annual report to Congress, a nine-page document dated May 2015, said it
had concluded its investigation into 105 of 113 cold cases involving 126
victims and conceded that “very few prosecutions have resulted from these
exhaustive efforts.”

OVER-REDACTION PROBLEM

A private citizen seeking to obtain
federal documents related to civil rights cold cases would have to file a
Freedom of Information Act or FOIA request, which commonly takes longer than a
year for the government to process and oftentimes ends with the government
providing documents that are heavily redacted in black ink, making the furnished
record almost useless.

The Justice Department’s inspector
general in September 2013 released an 83-page audit on the department’s
internal controls and “found several documents in which unclassified
information was inappropriately identified as being classified.” The report
suggests the 9/11 Commission, Congress, and the White House have all recognized
that the over-classification of information has several negative impacts,
including the fact that it “needlessly limits stakeholder and public access to
information.”

The Hightstown students say private
investigators would more easily be able to solve civil rights cold cases if
they had the ability to easily obtain minimally redacted federal cold case
files in a timely manner. Their bill is currently sitting in the U.S. House
Committee on Oversight and Government Reform for possible consideration.

The bill aims to establish a single
collection or repository containing civil rights cold case records that can be
easily obtained by the public in a timely fashion and without significant
redactions.

In March 2011, expert open
government advocate John Verdi testified before the House’s Oversight and
Government Reform Committee and said he believes “over-redaction is a real
problem” regarding how the federal government commonly releases heavily
redacted documents in response to public record requests. “I think it is an
even larger problem for FOIA requesters who have less legal expertise and are
less able to challenge those redactions in the administrative process and the
litigation process,” he said.

A racially motivated bombing that
rocked an Alabama black church in the 1960s took years before prosecutors won
any convictions, but even then, Hightstown students have recently obtained FBI
documents on the deadly incident that are almost completely blacked out with
redactions.

By unanimous consent, students in
Stuart “Stu” Wexler’s Advanced Placement or AP government and politics
Hightstown High class during the 2015-16 and 2016-17 schoolyears crafted their
legislation specifically to provide for the expeditious disclosure of records
related to civil rights cold cases. Their bill is modeled after the President
John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, which mandated
that all assassination-related material be housed in a single collection in the
National Archives and Records Administration, also known as NARA.

“We felt that our bill can work in
conjunction with the Emmett Till 2 Act, because it actually has some weaknesses
that we’ve noticed that have actually limited the ability of success or limited
the ability of the release of documents by the DOJ or the FBI or units like
that,” Hightstown High senior Dhruv Samdani said. “So we felt that our bill
would help actually lessen the redaction or erasing or blacking out of material
so that more investigative reporters could actually get the material necessary
to actually solving these cases.”

SEEKING JUSTICE

A Mississippi jury found two white
men not guilty of murdering 14-year-old Emmett Till. J.W. Milam and his
half-brother Roy Bryant later gave a magazine interview admitting they had
killed the black boy. No one has ever been convicted in the case, but the U.S.
Justice Department this month has suggested it may reopen its investigation
into the Emmett Till slaying.

Several members of the Ku Klux Klan
killed four black girls on Sept. 15, 1963, when they set off an explosion at
the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Robert Chambliss was
convicted of first-degree murder in 1977 and died in prison; Thomas Blanton was
found guilty of first-degree murder in 2001; and Bobby Frank Cherry was found
guilty in 2002 and died in prison about two years later.

Six hours after the KKK-planted bomb
exploded, 16-year-old black boy Johnny Robinson was shot and killed by white
Birmingham Police Officer Jack Parker. More than 50 years later, Robinson’s
slaying still remains unresolved, with the Justice Department reviewing the
incident in accordance with the Emmett Till 1 Act but closing the matter on
April 9, 2010, without initiating any prosecutions.

New Jersey Republican Congressman
Chris Smith in recent days has declared he will co-sponsor the Hightstown
students’ bill, which would make him the first GOP member and fifth
congressional representative to officially get behind the proposed legislation
as a formal co-sponsor.

“The Department of Justice Cold Case
Initiative, operating with guidance from the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights
Crime Act, has begun the important work of cataloging, analyzing and targeting
civil rights cold cases,” Smith said Thursday, April 13, in a statement. “I am
pleased to co-sponsor this new bill (H.R. 1272) — originally proposed by the AP
government Hightstown High School students — as a means to prompt additional
action and help secure justice for the victims and their families.”

PROUD TEACHER

When Stu Wexler polled his AP
students to see if they would be interested in drafting legislation seeking to
increase the likelihood of civil rights cold cases being solved during the
2015-16 schoolyear, he said he did not imagine the endeavor would eventually
make serious inroads with the lawmakers on Capitol Hill.

“If you would have asked me at the
end of November 2015, I would have probably said this is a nice worthwhile try
and it didn’t work out,” the Hightstown High School teacher said. “But the
students didn’t give up. The students this year have stated their intentions to
make it work. … We are not giving up. The students really showed a lot of
initiative and energy in this than I would have probably anticipated and hoped
for in a good way.”

Wexler, a longtime social studies
educator who has published books on civil rights cold cases, said he is
“incredibly proud” of his students’ efforts. He said their proposed legislation
promotes “a cause that I think every American can get behind and relate to,”
which is to try to bring justice to the criminals who have long gone unpunished
for committing hate crimes and to help bring closure to the victims’ families
who want to see civil rights cold cases solved.

“The students all know that the
committee is the key; 95 percent of bills die in committee,” Wexler said.
“(Utah’s U.S. Rep.) Jason Chaffetz, the goal is to try to get him to put the
bill on the committee’s agenda. We believe it is a bipartisan bill, and the
students have been working very hard.”

LOBBYING CONGRESS

Chaffetz presides over the House
Committee on Oversight and Government Reform as its chairman. Hightstown High
junior Jasman Singh and several of his classmates recently met with a
congressional staffer who reports directly to Chaffetz. “A lot of the
discussion was centered around the cost of the bill,” Singh said, “because in
this Congress they are trying to cut down the budget and crack down on big
federal government, so a lot of what he told us was, ‘If you can get something
underneath $500,000 in this Congress, it is basically considered free.’ So
that’s what he told us about costs and appropriations.”

H.R. 1272 co-sponsor Bonnie Watson
Coleman, who represents parts of Mercer, Middlesex, Somerset and Union counties
as New Jersey’s 12th Congressional District representative, is a member of the
House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

If the bill became law, it would
create an independent agency known as the Cold Case Records Review Board that
would be composed of five members appointed by the president of the United
States. The bill would require all nominees on the review board to be
“distinguished persons of high national professional reputation in their
respective fields who are capable of exercising the independent and objective
judgment necessary to fulfill their role in ensuring and facilitating the
review, transmission to the public, and public disclosure of files related to
cold cases and who possess an appreciation of the value of such material to the
public, scholars, and government.”

“The primary cost of this bill is
basically computerizing the records and digitizing them,” Singh said, adding
that there are perhaps hundreds of thousands of federal civil rights cold case
documents and that placing them into a digital collection with minimal
redactions “could potentially cost less than $1 million a year.”

“I’ve met with some Republican
congressmen,” said Hightstown High senior Lydia Francoeur, “and a lot of the
universities in a lot of Southern states, they are really active with civil
rights cases, and that’s where most of the cases took place, so they usually
are really receptive to our bill.”

Another senior student, Renuka
Kannan, said the key to success is getting Republicans and Democrats on board.

“I think that as long as we have
enough bipartisan support of co-sponsorship,” she said, “it should hopefully
get through the House at least, because of the fact that it is such a
bipartisan issue dealing with civil rights cold cases, which everyone should
have common interest in supporting.”

If the legislation stalls in
Congress, the Hightstown students said they intend to keep pushing for its
passage in the months or years ahead, if that’s what it takes to get the
measure enacted into law.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sulaiman Abdur-Rahman has been
working as a professional journalist since graduating from Temple University in
2007. Prior to his current stint at The Trentonian, Abdur-Rahman worked at The
Philadelphia Inquirer and wrote a self-published memoir about his 12-month
experience of living in Australia on a spouse visa. Reach the author at sulaiman@trentonian.com or
follow Sulaiman on Twitter: @sabdurr.